The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry, the communications industry and the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the internet over the past two years. It seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world will potentially involve human-computer interfaces, and especially such interfaces to communication networks such as the internet. As a result of these profound changes, there is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population which, up to a year or two ago, was computer-illiterate, or at best computer indifferent. In order for the vast computer supported market places to continue and be commercially productive, it will be necessary for a large segment of computer indifferent consumers, workers and business people to be involved in computer interfaces. In addition because of the vast amount of information potentially available through networks such as the internet, there has been an increasing demand on the part of relatively sophisticated users for implementations which make display terminal access to the internet less cluttered and confusing and of course easier to use.
The present invention is directed to the problems of providing less cluttered and easier graphical display access to communication network nodes, objects associated with such nodes as well as the attributes of such objects. In order to solve such problems, the above mentioned SYSTEM FOR DISPLAYING A COMPUTER MANAGED NETWORK LAYOUT WITH TRANSIENT DISPLAY OF USER SELECTED ATTRIBUTES OF DISPLAYED NETWORK OBJECTS, R. R. Scaer et. al., application makes use of transient displays in which user selected attributes of such nodes and objects may be displayed. The present invention relates to situations where the above mentioned graphical displays of network layouts is so comprehensive that the alphanumeric descriptive information which is customarily on display screens to explain, label and annotate the icons must be absent or kept to a minimum in order that the user interface remain easy to interpret. To this end, the present invention uses transient displays to provide the user with the primary and supplemental data that he may require with respect to network objects in an orderly arrangement of plural transient displays which does not clutter or interfere with the ease of use of the graphical interface.